I recently finished The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng. If you want a feel-good, loose-ends-tied-up book, this isn’t for you. Mr. Eng offers speculation about the motives of his characters, but ultimately there is no conclusive evidence. Even when the characters state certain reasons for their behavior, there are hidden or subconscious reasons perhaps not even realized by the individuals and certainly not by their acquaintances.
The serene carefully planned and controlled garden is juxtaposed against the chaotic dangerous times of the Malayan
Emergency, the attempt of Chinese-backed Communists to take over the country when the British decide to leave after the war. There are poetic beautiful descriptions of the garden, the jungle, the highlands countryside, yet the area is infested with violent guerilla fighters.
Why read such a book? I learned about a part of Southeast Asia I knew little about; about the Japanese Occupation of Malaya (now modern Malaysia) during World War II; about the Communist struggle for power that ultimately failed. I learned about woodcutting prints, tattoo artistry, and the principles of Japanese gardening. More importantly, the book touches on issues that will cause you to think deeply about life perceptions and the meaning of personhood.
Things and people are not always what they appear to be. The Japanese garden central to the story has hidden views or features that only reveal themselves at certain times or from unusual positions, such as the bending to drink from a fountain that allows the viewer to see below the tree branches to a distant mountain framed by the foliage. Characters also have aspects of themselves that are slowly but perhaps not fully disclosed as the story progresses. There is a sense of Asian inscrutability about Arimoto the gardener and Yun Ling the Chinese woman. At the end, you wonder did you really get to know these people? But don’t we all have hidden depths that are rarely exposed to others? Mr. Eng seems to suggest that.
How much is one’s identity tied to family, to culture, to ethnicity, to country of birth or residence? To one’s memories? What if you knew that you would mentally lose access to your past?
That is the prognosis for Yun Ling, the main character, the narrator or voice of the book. She has primary progressive aphasia. She has episodes when written words are nothing but meaningless squiggles and eventually the spoken word will be gibberish. Perhaps sights, sounds, touch will evoke feelings of familiarity, but she will have no way to verbalize her memories to herself or others, to understand why she has these feelings. She decides to work thru her memories and record them while she still can. This is painful at times as she has not had an easy life.
The book covers three time periods: Yun Ling’s three years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp; the 1950s when she lived in the Cameron Highlands and was involved with the only Japanese garden in Malaya; and her current life which is almost 40 years past her first encounter with the Japanese garden. The time periods are not related to the reader in a straight chronology, but rather interspersed with her current situation as she thinks on her past to record it. Admittedly, this at times leads to some momentary uncertainty for the reader. It sometimes takes a few paragraphs to realize she has switched back to her today. It is worth the effort though to keep with her train of thought.
The book displays the ironies of life. Malaya had a great mix of people from different backgrounds and countries. Yun Ling’s friend Magnus Praetorius who owns a tea plantation, hates the British because of what happened to his family in South Africa during the Boer War, yet as an ex-pat he ends up settling in a country ruled by the British. Yun Ling who has suffered greatly at the hands of the Japanese ends up as an apprentice to a Japanese gardener. To understand why, you must journey through the book.
This is a tale of complex relationships among people who have suffered loss of family, loss of peace, loss of face, loss of family honor, sometimes loss of native country, yet survived. Because she is a survivor, we have peace that Yun Ling will survive her loss of language and memory. We can envision her in the garden surrounded by things dear to her, that will speak to her and comfort her without words.
